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Is anyone else excited by the prospect of digital/tablet magazines? I think I am but still, like vinyl, want my nice print copies of most things and not sure I'll get an iPad (might get a Skiff or something like that). I probably read 20 magazines a month, mostly things like Wired, F@st company, Huck, FT Weekend, Loops and stuff like that. Basically anything that has either a feature on Henry Rollins or the damage technology is doing to the world and I'm paying for it at the counter and walking into people reading it walking up the street.

I wonder about the iPad. I mean, it's sites like this and many others that work well, and blogs are being designed very closely to effective 'magazines' now. So do we need silly formatting to make it any better?

our average time per page on reviewed dipped a few years ago as a lot of people just checkout the score and comments and leave the page, without reading. there's a lot of "tl;dr" comments. computers aren't a great medium to read on, especially as people spend all day now reading pixelated emails and getting white boxes imprinted on their retinas.

plus, with the web, you can't dedicate space (i.e. a 10 page feature) or get distracted/sucked in by imagery or browse as easily as you can with a magazine. the web is so rigid and most developers (dis included) are beholden to people still using IE6.

i think the main thing is, like iphone apps, is that people might actually pay for an ipad magazine, as there is a payment mechanism. i think websites will turn more into news outlets and discussion topics, whilst all the heft and focus goes into a product people can sell.

plus, i kinda disagree about blogs, most of them have a few sentences, rather than any indepth analysis (case in point http://drownedinsoundcloud.com )

BUT you need to remember that you're thinking about the music press here - websites like http://www.woodworkersinstitute.com/ for instance have so VERY many readers, for huge amounts of time too, because the readers are true 'subject nerds'.

So I think maybe for music/lifestyle where TL:DR is so prevalent, you're right, and yes, with android/iphone so strong there'll need to be rethinking. But then again sites configured for the size of the ipad will come out awkward on an iphone i suspect - it's going to mean a hell of a lot of multi-platform thought.

It's not to say I don't think it's a good idea however. But I can't help but think of the Wii - initial ingenuity, and then shoehorning the technology in silly ways.

based on the lack of traffic some of our coverage of new/little known acts get. people click on what they know or have vaguely heard of. some people have their niches. others just want some recommendations. we live in a ready-meal age and people want recommendations in an instant, there's nowhere near as much time invested in reading and discovery as there once was. it's really weird but we've noticed the change over the past 5 years. we now get more traffic than ever before but most of it is people hitting up the archive via google or reacting to things on the boards, much more than it was 6 or more years ago when there weren't as many blogs or chances to hear stuff for yourself. plus the dynamic of the community has changed a lot since people can now share thoughts and discuss stuff via a range of mediums, they don't need to come to a site like DiS to do it (although obviously 30,000+ people do come to talk, rate and alsorts of other things everyday - half a million of them a month!)

anyway, what i'm saying is that people aren't investing as much time in exploring or reading things in depth. for instance, our horrors and yeah yeah yeahs album reviews were two of the most read things on the site last year, yet the interviews with both bands, which (and I'm not just saying this) were two of the best bits we ran on the site last year, really interesting and revealing, yet they had about a third of the traffic of the album reviews!

i used to buy a lot more than that, especially when there was Melody Maker.
admittedly i included weekend newspapers in this rough tally (FT weekend magazine is always brilliant - recommend folks try it out every now and then if you haven't before)

2, maybe 3 at a push per month, with NME/MM each week on top, is the most I've ever gone for. And that was back in the day when I lived in the back of beyond and mags were my only contact with the culture of the bright lights/big city.

These days I'll get the odd magazine now and again, but there's nothing I get regularly. They tend to be an indulgence purchase or for when I'm on a train or plane. I'll normally get a paper on sat or sun (or sometimes both). Haven't bought NME for years and not in any regular way for a decade (although I hear good things about the new editor).

Wired or Prospect have been my most regular mag buys in recent times, but not each month. Maybe every other.

Wire is perhaps a little dry for my tastes. I bought mixmag for the Zinc CD the other month, but the mag itself had next to nowt of interest. All else seems to be the staid Q/Mojo bloke stuff.

And I don't read any music websites like magazines; often I'm guilty of what sean describes - clicking on a music review and just reading the score/comments. I think I need the compulsion to read through everything in full, in order, that magazines provide.

Do any websites compile the highlights of their content each month in to a sort of magazine format (either a pdf file or just a series of pages that you click through in sequence like a magazine)? Could DiS do this (would it even want to)?